


I Put a Spell On You

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Halloween, Halloween Costumes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12573800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Three Halloweens in the "Woman That Fell From the Sky" AU 'verse.





	1. "Cara Mia" (Halloween 2004)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [victorias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/victorias/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Woman That Fell From the Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936322) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin). 



**“GOMEZ: “How long has it been since we’ve waltzed?”  
** **MORTICIA: “Oh, Gomez … hours.”  
******_–The Addams Family_ ****

* * *

 

 

Holidays for the first few years are muted affairs.

Clarke is four when they move to Massachusetts, and the move is as great a shock to her system as the loss of her father.  The entirety of her small young life, undone and turned inside out.  Neither of them have the stomach for Thanksgiving or Christmas that year; Jake died in April and eight months is not enough time for them to face the misery of attempting to replicate holiday traditions without him.  New Year’s, Easter, Valentine’s Day, their wedding anniversary, Father’s Day, his birthday.  The endless, endless repetition of moments for which Jake is supposed to be there, but isn’t.

Then, a year and a half later, the terrible thing happens, the worst day of all their lives, and Marcus arrives at their doorstep with ash in his hair and kisses Abby’s mouth like she thought no one would ever kiss her again, and something, ever so faintly, begins to click into place.

He’s still there a month later, when the leaves begin to turn from green to gold to crimson, and the town begins to don its autumnal finery for the fall festival.

Clarke and Abby did not go to the festival last year.  Jake had been the one who carved their jack o’lanterns every year, elaborately detailed masterpieces of witches on broomsticks and black cats arching their backs.  He had a box of delicate, fine-bladed woodworking tools he used only for pumpkins, something Abby had long ridiculed him for.  She’d brought the box to Massachusetts, only because she could not bear to throw it away, but it had been moved straight to the garage and she’d never looked at it again.  She’d put a bowl of candy on the porch for the neighbor children, in the interests of seeming neighborly, but that was as much holiday spirit as she could muster.

Marcus, however, has never lived anywhere that was not New York City, and the fall festival is a thing of wonder to him.  So, to appease him – and because once he says the words “free candy” it’s impossible to dissuade Clarke from adding her pleas to his – they walk down after dinner on Halloween, and Abby – against all expectations, and very nearly against her will – finds herself slowly giving in to its charms.

There are orange twinkle lights wound around the columns of the gazebo in the town square and a small hay bale maze for the children.  There is a long table of caramel apples and popcorn balls and chocolate truffles dipped in orange fondant with charming toothy grins.  There is hot spiced cider in big black iron cauldrons, steaming with dry ice and scented with ginger and cinnamon, ladled out by a line of moms in pumpkin-embroidered aprons.  (Marcus and Abby’s steaming paper cups get discreetly spiked with bourbon by Roan, the hardware store owner, who shoves the flask back in his pocket as Officer Pike pretends not to notice.)  Clarke is the only child not wearing a costume; tiny witches and vampires and princesses and Frankensteins abound, along with one particularly grotesque blood-spattered zombie, introduced to them as Octavia Blake from down the street.

Everyone in town knows Dr. Griffin’s story by now – knew it within hours after the “SALE PENDING” sticker went up over the “FOR SALE” sign on the old white house on Birch Street.  Vincent the realtor had stopped by Indra’s for coffee that morning and told her everything, so by dinnertime everyone knew.  They orbited her at a safe distance for the first year or so, treating her rather gingerly, as though she were made of glass.  Under other circumstances she would have found this profoundly irritating, but inside that cocoon of grief, the less she had to talk to people, the better.

But now she’s at the fall festival, she’s drinking cider and holding hands with a tall dark-haired man in a leather jacket and she’s letting her tiny blonde daughter race through the hay bale maze at full throttle, excited squeals of glee echoing through the night air, and she’s _smiling,_ and this is the moment the town falls in love with Marcus Kane for the very first time.

Because he made the doctor smile.

* * *

He comes back for the fall festival the next year, and the year after that.  Abby still can’t bring herself to open the box in the garage, and says a gentle but firm no to Clarke’s pleas for elaborate decorations.  They put out a bowl of candy on the porch, as all the neighbors do, and they stroll down to the fall festival and drink their cider.  Abby lets Clarke wear a costume (a cat the first year, Belle the second), but declines to wear one herself.

By their fourth year in Massachusetts, Clarke is eight, and Abby’s lackluster commitment to Halloween becomes a bone of contention before school has even started.  Marcus let her watch _The Addams Family_ with him one night over the summer when Abby had an emergency late-night surgery and he was on parenting detail alone.  Clarke loves anything Marcus loves, so she is prepared for his favorite movie to become her favorite movie before he even turns the television on, and she falls head-over-heels for the glaring, morbid Wednesday Addams.  Maintaining basic table manners, after this, becomes a trial (“Pass the parmesan cheese.”  “What do we say, Clarke?”  “MORE.”) which Marcus’ badly-concealed chuckles do not help.  But she sets her heart on dressing up as Wednesday Addams in July, and by the time September turns the corner into October, she has worn her mother down.

Abby does not sew.  Or, more accurately, she does not sew fabric.  (Her surgical stitches are a thing of beauty, but those skills do not translate to any domestic project more elaborate than repairing a loose button.)  But her neighbor Callie does.  Callie was Abby’s first real friend in town, inviting her to book club and backyard barbecues and brunch potlucks until she slowly began to get her feet under her again, and begin to feel marginally less alone.  Callie is the neighborhood’s resident domestic goddess; her flower garden is always perfect, her table settings colorful and elegant, her sugar-dusted loaves of holiday gingerbread appearing like magic on doorsteps up and down the street every Christmas morning.  And she can sew, because of course she can, so once she overhears Clarke at the supermarket staring covetously at the racks of polyester costumes and lamenting the lack of a Wednesday, she steps in immediately.

“Oh, I love _The Addams Family_ ,” she tells Clarke, smiling.  “I’d be happy to make you a Wednesday costume.  Easy as pie.  And your mom should be Morticia, don’t you think?”

And once the words are said, of course, there is absolutely no peace in the Griffin household until Abby finally, finally, _finally_ heaves a weary sigh, walks across the street, knocks on Callie’s door, hands her a bottle of merlot, and says only, “I give in.”

Callie goes to work immediately, laughing Abby’s checkbook out of her hands (“don’t be an idiot, this is a gift”) and taking both mother and daughter’s measurements, occasionally leaning down to whisper conspiratorially in Clarke’s ear and making the girl giggle so hard her blonde curls bounce against her shoulders.   Two weeks later, two long flat boxes (wrapped in black paper with black silk ribbon, with the beheaded stem of a rose tucked in each, which makes Clarke shriek with glee) appear on the front step.  In Clarke’s, a crisp black dress with a starched white collar, black tights, little black boots, and even a black wig already combed sleek and braided into perfect tight pigtails; in Abby’s, a long black wig and a dress that makes her eyes widen when she puts it on its hanger and realizes how low the neckline plunges.  (“She’s bisexual,” points out an amused Marcus when she calls him that night, his voice sounding bitterly disappointed that he’ll be working that weekend and won’t get to see it.  “It’s a gift for you _and_ for her.”  Marcus has always liked Callie.)

Clarke loves her costume so much she has to be forcibly restrained from wearing it to school every single day for the whole last week of October, and something of her giddy joy begins to chip away, bit by bit, at Abby’s reserve.  She remembers this herself, after all, she’s not so old that she’s forgotten the year she dressed as Princess Leia and grew out her hair all year so it would be long enough for her mother to braid into side buns, or the year she was six and it rained so hard she had to wear galoshes under her Cinderella dress instead of glass slippers and cried about it all the way to the first house on the block but stopped as soon as she was handed a Kit-Kat.

Jake has been gone for four years.

The box has been in the garage long enough.

* * *

On Friday, when the school bus drops Clarke off on the corner, she is momentarily disoriented, and for a second, she is unsure whether she has arrived at the wrong house.  Because it looks like Halloween, for real, it’s the Halloween house of her eight-year-old dreams, with pumpkins and hay and a wreath of dried leaves on the door.  And when she opens the door, she gasps so loudly Abby can hear her in the kitchen and comes outside, wiping her hands on her apron.  ( _Mom is wearing an_ _apron_?)  There are shiny glass pumpkins and pretty black candlesticks and pretend spiderwebs on the dining room chandelier.

“You were too little to remember,” Abby says, “but me and your dad, we used to love Halloween.  We dressed up and had parties in the apartment every year.”

Clarke looks around, eyes even wider, taking it all in.

“Did all of this belong to Dad?”  Abby nods.  “Did you not want to look at it before because you were too sad?”

Abby is startled, as always, by the depth of this small child’s perceptiveness; sometimes it’s like talking to a tiny grownup.  She nods, not quite trusting her voice yet, but Clarke doesn’t press her any further.  “I’m glad you’re not so sad anymore,” is all she says, and trots into the kitchen where her eight-year-old senses have unerringly detected the scent of cookies.

The next morning, after pumpkin pancakes (picked up from Indra’s diner, of course; Abby’s baking skills were maxed out yesterday in baking ghost-shaped cookies and letting Clarke decorate them), Abby takes her daughter by the hand and leads her out to the backyard, where she has laid old newspaper all over the surface of the old rickety picnic table, and two absolutely perfect pumpkins – round, sleek, glossy, their sunset-orange skins free of every blemish – sit next to a cardboard box duct-taped shut which Clarke has never seen before.

“Pick one,” says Abby, and Clarke can’t do anything but fling her arms around her mother’s waist.

* * *

 Sunday dawns crisp and clear, perfect Halloween weather.  Clarke is incandescent with eight-year-old glee, and even Abby is finding herself, surprisingly, getting into the spirit of it.   They eat dinner early, around four-thirty, and Callie comes over to help them dress.   The knock at the door, around five-fifteen, just as Abby is finishing her makeup, startles her.  It’s far too early to be children; the fall festival kicks off around six, with the trick-or-treaters beginning their rounds shortly thereafter, once their parents have each had time for a cup or two of Roan’s “special” cider.  Abby leaves Clarke sitting on the side of her bed, Callie winding her blonde ringlets into neat little pincurls so the wig will lay flat, and descends the staircase reluctantly, already feeling a bit ridiculous.  If it’s the FedEx guy, and she’s in a skintight black dress cut so low she can’t even wear a bra …

The door swings open while she’s halfway down the stairs, startling the life out of her, and she freezes in place.

It’s definitely not the FedEx guy.

_“Cara mia,”_ says Marcus, who is standing at her door in a flawless Gomez Addams costume – pinstriped suit, slicked-back hair, his face clean-shaven save for a perfect pencil mustache – and Abby feels her heart crack open inside her chest.

She stands there, a little stupidly, not entirely convinced she isn’t simply imagining this, until he closed the door behind him and she finally collects herself enough to descend to the bottom of the stairs and meet him in the foyer.

“I would very much like to kiss you,” he says, fiery warmth in his gaze as his eyes travel up and down her body in the curve-hugging black dress, “but it looks like you just finished your makeup and I don’t want to ruin it.  So just know I’m saving one extra for later.”  But he does put his arms around her, pulling her close, pressing his mouth against the creamy bare skin of her shoulder, and she has to swallow hard over and over again to keep from crying off the perfect wings of black eyeliner that took her three tries to get right.

“How are you here?” she finally manages to whisper, but the mystery is solved before she can even finish her sentence.

“Clarke,” she hears Callie’s gleeful, mischievous voice from above her, “I believe your Halloween present is here.  Run downstairs so I can come take some pictures.”

“Pictures of what?” Clarke demands, little feet scampering out of her room towards the staircase, where she too stops short at the sight of him.

But Clarke recovers faster than her mother did, launching herself down the steps with lightning speed to fling her arms around him and let herself be lifted up and pulled close to his chest in a massive hug.  “You look just like him!” she squeals.  “You even have the mustache.”

Marcus sets her back down on her feet and examines her costume.  “Perfect,” he pronounces emphatically.  “She did great.”

“I told you I would,” laughs Callie, descending the stairs, camera in hand.

Abby stares from one to the other.  “Did you two cook this up together?”

Marcus and Callie grin at each other conspiratorially, like mischievous children.  “Maybe,” he says, refusing to elaborate further, then bows deeply at Abby and holds out his hand to her.   _“Cara mia,”_ he says again, his low voice making her shiver even with Clarke and Callie standing right there.

“You’re staying the night, right?” she murmurs into his ear as they pose for photo after photo, so quietly that Clarke doesn’t hear her.

He chuckles, warm and low.  “That depends.  You don’t have to give the dress back, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m definitely staying the night.”

“I can’t promise you I’ll want to wear the wig any longer than I have to.”

“I’m willing to compromise on the wig,” he says, winking at her, and then pulls back and pivots smoothly on his heel to dip her dramatically in his arms, making Clarke giggle, and suddenly even the delicious thought of Marcus unzipping her out of the tight black dress is pushed out of her mind by the realization of what this is and what she’s doing.

They have matching Halloween costumes, so they can go trick-or-treating together.

Callie is taking family photos of them.

These are family photos.

_They are a family._

She feels that old, familiar pang in her chest, thinking of Jake, but it doesn’t push the smile away or dull her happiness.  Not like it used to.

Jake always meant that box to be opened.  He always meant those orange paper Halloween lanterns to hang over the dining room table.  He always wanted this for Clarke.  He would want this for her now.

Perhaps it is possible, after all, to get back the thing she’d lost.  Something different, but no less real.

Because Marcus is family now.  She knows this, down to her bones.  Yes, he came to see her, and yes, she can tell from the way his eyes never leave her that the allure of Abby dressed as one of his favorite movie characters was a powerful draw.

But he did this for Clarke.

She knows this even before she makes him say it to her, out loud, later that night, as they stand in the white glow of moonlight streaming in through her bedroom window, as he steps in close to her and kisses the back of her neck to unzip the black dress.  She knows it as he leans over to steal a bite from Clarke’s candy apple, knows it every time he reaches out instinctively for her tiny hand as they cross the street to get to the next house, knows it as he lifts her into his arms to let her sleepy head droop onto his pinstriped shoulder as they make their way back home.

Every time he gets in his car and drives out of Manhattan and through the long stretches of forest-lined highway to pull up in front of her front door, it is not only Abby he’s coming home to.

“I just like to see her happy,” he says helplessly, when she asks him, and she does kiss him then, turning around in his arms, unzipped dress sliding off her shoulders, black wig and red lipstick gone, face pink and clean.  Just Abby and Marcus, alone in the moonlight, with a tiny blonde creature snoring two rooms away, sleeping the sleep of the candy-intoxicated, hair a wild golden cloud from Callie’s pincurls.  “I just wanted to see the look on her face.”

“I don’t know how to tell you,” she starts to say, but can’t finish the sentence.  She doesn’t have the words for him, for what it means to her.  He bought a suit for this, shaved off his beard for this, cut his hair for this, and drove four hours from Manhattan with a jack o’lantern in his back seat, just to make Clarke smile on Halloween.

He tilts her chin up to look into her eyes, and she sees that his are shining with tears.  “I like to see you happy too,” he says softly, and then bends his head to kiss her, and no one says anything for a long time after that.

* * *

He lets her sleep in the next morning, since it’s her day off, and takes Clarke to school himself.  She wakes around nine-thirty to the smell of nutmeg and cinnamon, and comes downstairs in her pajamas to see a pan of pumpkin-cinnamon bread pudding on the counter.  The kitchen is empty, but she knows he must be home; there’s a steaming mug of coffee on the marble island, with more in the pot for her, and his keys and wallet are sitting next to them, along with a little rectangle of yellow paper, creased like he’d folded it up and put it in his pocket.  But it’s unfolded now, and she can see the logo of Saint Henry’s Church at the top of it, which is unexpected enough that it prompts her to pick it up and read it.

It’s a receipt for a five-dollar donation.

She stares at it for a long time, bleary with sleep, puzzling it out, before she hears the back door close and sees him come up the steps, holding the glass votives he took out of the jack o’lanterns before putting them into the compost bin.

_“Dia de los Muertos,”_ he says softly, as he enters the kitchen.  “Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day.  Clarke and I stopped by the church to light a candle.”

“For Jake,” she whispers, and he nods.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he confesses, coming closer and putting his arms around her.  “Any of this.  But I always want her to feel like there’s room for both of us – for him and for me – to live side-by-side.”  He kisses the top of her head.  “Is that okay?” he murmurs into her hair, sudden worry in his voice.  “Should I have asked?”

She shakes her head, face still buried in his chest, the cotton of his sweater warm and soft beneath her cheek.

“No,” she whispers.  “It’s perfect.  You did everything right.”


	2. “Fox-Trot Time” (Halloween 2009)

**“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.”  
– Dashiell Hammett, from _The Thin Man_**

* * *

 

When Abby left New York nine years ago, she left it for good.

She and Jake had built a life there, one they’d believed would last.  She’d moved there young and made it her home and loved it with the same fervent intensity as all the city’s Midwestern expatriates.  But all of that meant nothing without Jake.

There was nowhere she could run to escape the crushing sorrow of loss.  Every bodega, every hole-in-the-wall wine bar, every bench in Central Park, every subway station, Jake was there.  The bank where he’d been shot was on her way to work.  The hospital cafeteria on the third floor looked out over the police station where she’d sat, cold and numb and dry-eyed, filling out form after form while Marcus attempted to comfort the confused and tearful Clarke on the bench in the hallway outside.

She could not stay in this place.

The job in Massachusetts had been offered to her a month before Jake’s death, and she had declined it.  They were New Yorkers, she’d explained to the hospital recruiter.  Their daughter would be a New Yorker too.  The city was their home, and they couldn’t imagine leaving it.

The job was still open six weeks later, something that seemed to Abby to be a kind of miracle; they couldn’t find any other surgeons of her caliber willing to move out to the middle of nowhere – leaving behind every modern amenity, from Korean barbecue to decent theatre – to take a job in a small sleepy town with only a few thousand residents.

But Jake had never set foot in that town.  She had never even told him its name.  It felt, in that moment, like the one place in the world she could go to escape.

So she packed up her car, strapped Clarke into the backseat, and off they went.

And she never went back.

Nine years ago, watching the New York skyline disappear in her rearview mirror as steel buildings turned into green forests, she hadn’t been able to imagine ever returning.  She hadn’t thought the pain would ever fade.

But Clarke is a freshman in high school now, and they’ve made a life for themselves, and it doesn’t hurt to remember Jake the way that it used to.  She’s changed.  Marcus has changed her.  She’s older and sadder than she was when she and Jake were reckless urban twentysomethings together, but she’s also steadier on her feet.

It’s because Marcus knows this – because Marcus can sense this – that he even dares to ask her the question.

* * *

It starts with a senior citizens’ cruise to the Bahamas.

Abby’s parents come to Massachusetts for Christmas every year, to flagrantly spoil their granddaughter.  But this year, they have, improbably, entered some grocery store sweepstakes and actually won, which means they will be spending the latter half of December aboard what Marcus describes as “an unfathomably enormous maritime shrine to capitalism, with liquor”, thus depriving them of their best opportunity to buy fourteen-year-old Clarke hundreds of dollars’ worth of things she doesn’t need.  Abby suggests Thanksgiving as a compromise, privately hoping they’ll decline it; her parents have very particular views on proper Thanksgiving food, and with her mother there to appraise it she will never be able to relax about the turkey, even though Marcus has never messed it up once.  

But they have an entirely different solution in mind.  They want to take Clarke to Disneyland for Halloween.

Clarke, of course, is over the moon, and says yes immediately, only afterwards pausing to realize that Marcus – now the fall festival’s most devoted attendee – will be crushed.  It’s quietly become a tradition over the past few years, and if his fans have noticed that he never takes Halloween concert gigs, no matter how good the money, they’ve certainly never put two and two together.  He would never dream of missing a Halloween with Clarke and Abby, and Clarke is afraid she’ll hurt his feelings if she tells him that this year, she’ll be the one who isn’t coming home.

Like a chicken, she makes Abby break the bad news to him.  Ordinarily her mother would protest this uncharacteristic abdication of responsibility, but the tradeoff is a promise to clean her room without being reminded every day from now until the trip, an offer Abby can’t refuse.  She approaches the topic gingerly, and Marcus is predictably disappointed, but brightens almost immediately, that endearing lift in his voice she knows means he’s just had a great idea.

“Come to New York with me,” he says, startling her into silence.

“What?”

“For Halloween.  Come to New York this year.”

Abby has always thought she would never go back.  But she loves the fall festival because Clarke and Marcus love it and she can’t imagine enjoying herself there without them; so, surprising both of them, she says yes.

“You used to love throwing Halloween parties with Jake,” he says, his voice gentle, cautious.  “Do you think maybe … _we_ could have one?”

She pauses for a long moment before responding, the magnitude of the thing hovering between them apparent to both.  It sounds like such a small thing, but it isn’t.  It’s massive.  It’s a real question.  It’s a decisive relationship step.  Can she not only return to the city she left behind, the city where she was Jake’s friend and then lover and then wife, but return there for the purpose of being a couple in public with somebody else?

The last time she did this, it was in the tiny Brooklyn apartment she’d shared with Jake since they were college students.  He’d stood on the kitchen table to drape orange and black crepe paper along the ceiling and replace the bulbs in the light fixture with ones that glowed green, and they’d handed out gummy snakes and spiders to all the trick-or-treating kids in the building.  Clarke had been three and told her parents she wanted to dress up for Halloween as a cup, a bizarre notion from which they could not dissuade her (“Clarke, why do you want to dress up as a cup?” “I like cups.” “We could go to the store and look at other costumes –“ “NO A CUP A CUP A CUP”), so Jake had sighed and gone down to the basement and dug through the piles of recycling in the trash room to find a cardboard box, which he cut into a cylinder and covered with a red plastic tablecloth, pleated at the top and edged in white, like a red Solo cup.  He had written “DO NOT DRINK” on it in black Sharpie, which Clarke found hilarious.

The last time she’d experienced Halloween in the city, she’d been a wife and the mom of a toddler and a big-shot surgeon on the rise, shooting up through the ranks at Sloan-Kettering, destined for greatness.

The last time she and Marcus were alone together in New York, they were drinking coffee and flirting and very nearly holding hands while Jake was being raced in an ambulance to the hospital where she worked.

It’s not just about the party.

She thinks for a long time, and he waits patiently, quiet at the other end of the line, letting her have her space.  She turns it over and over in her mind before finally speaking.

“Can we compromise?” she finally asks.  “Yes to New York, and yes to a party, as long as it’s very small and you can promise I won’t get my face in a magazine or something.  I don’t …”  She pauses, unsure how to say what she wants to say without hurting him.

“You don’t want to go out in public with me in the city,” he finishes for her, and the sadness in his voice isn’t directed at her, but she feels it anyway.

“I can’t,” she says heavily.  “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Abby.”

“I’m just not quite ready to end up on a Worst-Dressed List,” she jokes weakly, but neither of them laugh.  It’s just a little too close to being true.  

Marcus is very careful about deflecting attention away from Abby and her town.  He’s friends with a lot of beautiful women and he usually takes one of them to the red carpet events Abby finds too terrifying to even consider.  He has a nice comfortable arrangement with a young actress friend of his named Lexa, a rising young romantic comedy star whose agents have been very blunt with her about not coming out as a lesbian until she’s “more reliably bankable,” so she and Marcus are often each other’s red carpet safety net.  Abby likes Lexa.  They had lunch once when Abby was in L.A. for work.  Every time an awards thing comes up, Marcus always asks Abby if she’d like to go, and she always suggests he take Lexa instead.  All it would take, she reminds him, is one sharp-eyed music journalist, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.  Which is everybody’s nightmare.

So Marcus goes on appearing in public with scores of different lovely women and journalists keep breathlessly speculating about who “The Woman” might be and Abby continues living the calm, quiet life she built for herself, which Marcus gets to share when he comes to visit.

But it doesn’t go both ways.

Abby’s town will always protect her.  New York City never will.

“I’ll come,” she tells him, “if we can be normal people for the weekend.  If you can be Marcus, and not _Marcus Kane.”_

“I’ll do the best I can,” he tells her, but then she hears that little lift in his voice again.

“What?” she demands.  “What are you plotting?”

“A small private party,” he insists, and she can hear him grinning through the phone.  “Just like you asked.  I promise.”

* * *

Jake never liked black-and-white movies.

This was a fight they had many times.  “ _Casablanca_ is a _classic_!” Abby would insist, causing Jake to roll his eyes.

“No, _Rocky_ is a classic,” was his inevitable rebuttal.  “ _Casablanca_ is just old.”

“It’s considered one of the greatest films of all time.”

Jake would dismiss this with a handwave.  “It doesn’t even have any explosions in it.”

“It’s a _war_ movie, of _course_ it has explosions,” Abby would retort, though she had not seen it in so many years she could not always reliably remember whether or not this was true.  And so on and so forth, ad infinitum, until Jake would smack her on the ass and make her laugh and they’d forget what they were arguing about because kissing was a much better use of the couch than watching a movie anyway.

But Marcus loves old movies as much as she does.  Just one of the many small constant reminders that this relationship is profoundly different from her last one.  Not better or worse, not more or less, but endlessly, constantly, impossibly different, in ways she is still discovering.

They’d watched _The Thin Man_ together on the couch one night, three or four days after he’d first arrived on her doorstep, the whole world still reeling.  He’d been clicking through the cable channels, trying to find something that wasn’t another replay of the same sickening footage of the plane smashing into the towers, and had landed on a marathon of Myrna Loy films on one of the classic movie networks, _The Thin Man_ just starting.  “I love this movie,” he’d said absently, almost to himself more than to her, and Abby turned from where she sat beside him to rest her forehead against the soft blue cotton of his sweater, and began to cry.  He cupped her cheek in his hand and tilted her face up to regard her with confusion and a degree of worry that teetered on the edge of panic.  But through the tears she was smiling.

“You sounded like _you,”_ she said softly.  “Just now.  When you said that.  It was the first time since you’ve gotten here that you sounded like yourself again.”

He didn’t say anything.  He knew exactly what she meant.

So she rested her head on his shoulder, curled up into the cradle of his arm, and they watched Nick and Nora Charles quip and banter and toss back oceans of champagne and solve murders in glamorous 1920’s New York, along with their faithful dog Asta, and for an hour and a half they forgot about everything that wasn’t the movie and each other, and Abby fell asleep in bed that night with her head pillowed on his bare chest, listening to his heartbeat and thinking to herself that maybe such a thing as happiness was really possible.

They’ve watched it dozens of times in the intervening years, and it has lost none of its charm, which makes it perhaps inevitable as Marcus’ suggestion for their Halloween costume.

“Why are we dressing up? I thought we were just having a small, casual party,” she asks suspiciously, when he calls to make the suggestion, and she hears him hesitate on the other end of the line for just a moment before carefully answering, “ … You never said ‘casual.’”

“I definitely did.”

“Small. I agreed to small.”

“Marcus – “

“Clarke will never forgive me if I don’t make you wear a costume this year.”

“Marcus –”

“Is that Marcus?” asks Clarke, strolling in from the other room as if on cue (which she might be; it’s entirely possible that he texted her).  “He showed me your costumes and they’re _so cool.”_

So that, of course, is the end of that. Nick and Nora it is.  (He’s even managed to locate a stuffed wire fox terrier.)

Marcus has opted for the costumes from the Christmas party scene, with Nora in a floaty tiered confection of black-and-white striped chiffon, hair curled into sleek Marcelle waves, and Nick in a dapper pinstriped suit and white pocket square, hair slicked back, beard shaved off once again into a perfect tiny handlebar mustache. (“You could just recycle your Gomez costume,” she’d pointed out when he sent the photos, which he rebutted with indignation.  “Abby, this is a _completely different suit.”_ )

He’s also decided the party should be held in one of the private banquet rooms at the old Sutton Club Hotel, where Dashiell Hammett wrote _The Thin Man,_ a decision he plays off to Abby as merely aggressive commitment to the theme, but she knows better.  It’s to protect her, and their guests, from being seen coming in or out of his apartment, which is never free from the watchful eyes of paparazzi.  

If they’d had the party at Marcus’ apartment, Abby would never be able to let down her guard, too worried about being spotted.

But anyone can enter a hotel and get into an elevator and go up to the sixth floor and give their name to the pair of unsmiling security guards (incognito in hotel uniforms) outside Event Room C, and close the door behind them, without _People Magazine_ being any the wiser.

They spend the nights before and after the party in the hotel.  It feels like a sinful indulgence to share a king-sized bed with Marcus after so many nights curled up together in the center of the full-sized mattress she’d bought for a house she thought she would always live in alone,  and which she has always felt superstitious about trading in for a roomier one now that an extremely tall man who sometimes hogs the covers is sharing her bed on a semi-regular basis.  It feels too much like tempting fate.  So they’ve simply gotten used to it, sleeping tangled up together in the center of the only-just-big-enough mattress.  The gleaming white linens and pillow-top  at the Sutton Place are an unimaginable luxury.  Though they still sleep tangled up together in the center anyway.  Old habits.

Marcus will not let Abby help with, or even see, the decorations until it’s time for the party.  He has not even shown her the guest list.  It’s impossible to shake the worry that he has perhaps adhered too strictly to the _letter_ of the law (“small”) while entirely discarding the _spirit_ of it (will they be drinking thousand-dollar champagne? Is she going to have to make small talk with Sting again?).  She dresses alone in their room (he put his suit on hours ago and is downstairs with the caterers), and realizes she feels oddly vulnerable without Clarke.  It’s only Halloween, it’s not Thanksgiving or Christmas, she knows that, but it’s the first holiday they’ve ever spent apart.  She would feel safer walking into a room full of strangers in a 1920’s movie costume if her daughter was there to zip up her dress and pin up the back of her hair and hold her hand.

But Clarke’s not here, she’s at Mickey’s Halloween Ball with her grandparents, wearing a pair of orange neon light-up ears and beaming with joy and texting her mother picture after picture of the parade and the rides and the alarming number of shopping bags slowly accruing in her Cinderella-themed hotel room, which means Abby has to make an entrance on her own into a room full of famous strangers, which is basically her nightmare.

Her heart pounds in her chest as she puts the finishing touches on her bright red lipstick, closes the hotel room door behind her, takes the elevator down two floors, says hello to Marcus’ security guards, who wave her past, and then opens the white and gold door.

“Surprise!” says Marcus, and Abby’s heart stops when she realizes she knows everyone in the room.

Marcus didn’t throw a fancy Halloween party for all his famous friends to meet his girlfriend and shove her uncomfortably into a spotlight she doesn’t want.  

He threw a fancy Halloween party as a gift for her, and filled it with all the friends she left behind when she moved out of the city.

He kept his promise; by Marcus standards, 30 people counts as “small”, so she’s willing to allow it.  Because every single one of them is a person that she loves and misses and thought she’d never see again.  The elderly Italian couple who lived next door to her and Jake for six years, who babysat Clarke when the daycare was closed and brought pans of meatballs in Sunday gravy over every week so the broke young parents could eat at least one home-cooked meal.  The two nurses who worked under her the whole time she was at Sloan-Kettering, who’d become her right and left hand, and who had been devastated when she left.  The priest who’d married them and said Jake’s funeral.  The parents of Clarke’s best friends from day care.  And more than a dozen others, friends of hers, friends of Jake’s, people she has missed since the day she left but couldn’t quite bear to face again for fear of reopening old wounds.  People she’d thought, so often, about calling, or visiting, or emailing, but hadn’t, because what if it turned out she wasn’t ready to spend time with anyone who had their own memories of Jake?

But they’re here, they’re all _here,_ and they’re mingling with friends of Marcus’ who she actually likes, the ones who don’t terrify her.  No Cynthia Nixon, no Thelonious J.  But she recognizes his drummer and bass player and road crew, she recognizes his old roommates from the shitty Queens apartment he was living in when she first met him, she recognizes the bartender from the East Village dive where he used to play every Thursday and who always snuck him a free beer when Marcus was too broke to pay for it himself.

These are their real people.  These are their real friends.  This is Marcus Kane’s real New York.

She’s so overwhelmed by the sea of smiling faces in front of her that she doesn’t notice until a few minutes have passed and she’s been hugged by everyone in the room how perfect everything else is.  The decorations, simple and elegant in black and white and gold.  The food, indulgent but not so expensive that it makes Abby uncomfortable, and no pretentious hotel waiters; just trays heaped with crab cakes and spinach tartlets and chocolate truffles all over the room, for everyone to graze to their heart’s content.  

No bartender, either; Marcus has taken on this job himself.

“’The important thing is the rhythm,’” she hears him quoting Nick Charles cheerfully to her old neighbors as she approaches the bar.  “’Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.’”

The neighbors are unimpressed enough with Marcus Kane’s fame and fortune to roll their eyes at this ever so faintly as they take their dry martini, and Abby feels the tension in her spine unknit for the first time since Marcus said the words “Come to New York with me” a month ago.

Her friends are talking to Marcus Kane as though he is a normal person.  As though he is simply the man Abby loves.  A man wearing the costume of a film noir detective, a man who cut decorations out of gold paper himself and taught himself how to shake a Manhattan to fox-trot time and who has spent so many years listening so carefully to everything Abby has ever said to him that he knew every single person she would want to see in that room.  Marcus is already a star by now, Marcus has opened for U2 all over Europe and “The Girl Inside the Mountain” is already piling up an awful lot of zeroes in that bank account that will pay Clarke’s way to college in a few short years.  But nobody mentions this.  They let him leave all of that on the other side of the door for tonight.

And none of them have forgotten Jake.

On the contrary, he’s _everywhere,_ everyone mentions him, everyone tells stories about him, everyone asks if Clarke still has his eyes.  Does Abby remember the year she tried to make Jake hand out raisins instead of candy because it was healthier, so he retaliated by purchasing an industrial-sized bag of king-sized Snickers bars.  Or the time they’d made a green Jello mold full of gummy eyeballs and it had worked flawlessly as a Halloween decoration but looked too weird to eat, sitting untouched in the center of the snack table until everyone went home and Jake threw it away, but left one gummy eyeball in the bottom of Abby’s coffee mug to make her scream the next morning. 

It has never occurred to Abby how deeply it would heal her heart to talk about Jake, to hear other people’s stories about him, to know how much he was missed by people who weren’t her lover or her child.

She needed this, and she didn’t even know it.

But Marcus did.

She’s wondered, from time to time, whether her old friends, the people who shared her life when she shared it with Jake, would look on her relationship with Marcus as a betrayal.  Perhaps it’s this, in part, that’s kept her from coming back to the city.  

But she needn’t have worried.

All of them see it.

When they look over at Marcus in the corner, brushing a loose curl out of Abby’s eyes, they smile, every one of them.

“Good for her,” they’ll all say to their spouses in the taxis on the way home.  “I’m glad she’s happy.”


	3. "It Was a Graveyard Smash" (Halloween 2017)

**“Halloween shadows played upon the walls of the houses. In the sky the Halloween moon raced in and out of the clouds. The Halloween wind was blowing, not a blasting of wind but a right-sized swelling, falling, and gushing of wind. It was a lovely and exciting night, exactly the kind of night Halloween should be.”**

**\--Eleanor Estes**

* * *

 

 **INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (unedited)**  
**11/4/2017**

 **RAVEN REYES:** . . . mind if I record this?

 **BELLAMY BLAKE:** This is for the book?

RR: For the book, yeah.

BB: Why are we in the book?

 **OCTAVIA BLAKE:** We’re not in the book, dumbass, Marcus and Abby are in the book.

RR: It started as more of an, I guess like a more traditional biography of Marcus, like focused on the discography and kind of his evolution as an artist, but it’s kind of . . . taken a left turn, a little bit.

OB: More about the town.

RR: You can’t really talk about Abby Griffin without talking about this town.

BB: No, I mean, I get that, I just don’t get why -

RR: Why the haunted house story?

OB: Why are you being so weird about this?

BB: I’m not being weird.

OB: You’re being weird.

BB: I’m not like . . . I mean this is going in a _book,_ I’m not a writer, I can’t tell the story in a way that sounds good for a book.

OB: You realize Raven’s writing the actual book, right? Like you understand how publishing works.

BB: Shut up, O.

OB: What happens is, we say words into this recorder -

BB: [unintelligible]

RR: If you don’t want to do it, Bellamy, it’s totally fine.

OB: No, it’s not. Bell, come on. You don’t have to sound fancy. Just tell what you remember. Come on. We’re doing this for Marcus and Abby. We owe them for all those Thanksgiving dinners.

BB: I know.

OB: Not to mention that Marcus pretty much bankrolled our lemonade stand every year. And I’m pretty sure he’s the only reason you guys ever got new Little League uniforms.

BB: You don’t have to convince me I like Marcus Kane. I already _know_ all of this. I just . . .

OB: You just don’t want to be in the book because you're lame.

BB: That’s not -

OB: Fine then. I’ll start. Okay, so the town used to have a haunted house every year, way over on Spruce like half a mile past the football field in this kind of fifties-looking house owned by the brother of the principal. The high school ran it as like an annual fundraiser thing, they’d come over and decorate and dress up and scare kids for three bucks each and the money went to the drama department. But then the couple retired and moved to Florida, and the house got turned into a bank, and nobody else was willing to volunteer their house to do it. So for like ten years there was no haunted house in town, and the drama department started doing the holiday wreath sale fundraisers instead.

BB: Do you remember it?

OB: The haunted house? Oh, yeah. I totally remember it. I bet it would look cheesy to me now, but man, when I was eight, that shit was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

BB: You liked the murder room best, I remember. The one with all the dismembered body parts. The bloodier the better.

OB: That part I don’t remember, but it sounds like me.

BB: Anyway, so there’s a town meeting every June to kick off the holiday festival planning -

OB: They start really early -

BB: And Abby had to go because she’s on the budget committee and had to present a thing on, what was it, was it the sign?

OB: Yeah, bids for the new town sign.

BB: So Marcus went with her, and that’s how it started.

OB: Somebody just casually mentioned that the kids hadn’t had a haunted house in ten years, and his ears just perked right up.

BB: Lincoln was there at the meeting, he came home and he was like “Rock Star Dad is up to something.”

RR: “Rock Star Dad?”

OB: Emori started it - you know, from the record store? - and then it just kind of . . . stuck.

BB: So like four hours later, sure enough - _[imitates sound of knocking]_

OB: I was honestly flattered he came to us first.

BB: His exact words were, “No one in this town has a higher tolerance for blood and gore than you, Octavia.” I don’t think it was a compliment.

OB: I choose to believe that it was.

BB: Whatever.

OB: You’re just jealous. He picked me for my artistic vision. He only picked you because you’re tall.

BB: Artistic vision? Just dumping buckets of fake blood over everything is _artistic?_ If it was up to you, every room of the house would just have been _Carrie_ over and over.

OB: Well, fortunately for you, it wasn’t up to me. It was Marcus’ show from the beginning. He had . . . very complicated ideas.

BB: So the first flaw in his plan is that his wife is a regular normal human being, who did not want her entire house turned upside-down for literally weeks while he built elaborate decorations in every single room.

OB: Abby’s no fun.

BB: No, Abby is _sane._ Would _you_ want to have severed heads staring at you from the mirror while you’re peeing?

OB: I don’t know what she expected. She’s seen him at the festival before. One caramel apple in, and he’s worse than a kindergartener.

BB: Yeah, never go into the corn maze with him.

OB: Anyway, so problem #1 was, we had to find another house to haunt. Abby kind of put her foot down.

BB: More than “kind of.”

OB: The Elm Street house was my idea. Get it? Like “Nightmare On” -

BB: She gets it, O. It’s a pretty straightforward joke.

OB: Anyway, there’s this old house on Elm Street that our neighbor Vincent, he’s a realtor, has had on the market for like six months without a bite. And in exchange for Marcus promising to foot the bill for all the cleaning, he told him he could take it over for the month for the haunted house.

BB: I think he figured it would be good publicity.

OB: So we told him, what the hell, sure, we’d help out, and then . . . well . . .

BB: Once you get an idea in Marcus Kane’s head, man . . .

OB: The emails started coming in August and from then on it was nonstop.

BB: By the middle of October I had to put his texts on mute. Don’t put that in the book.

OB: I didn’t quite get why he was so crazy into it until after Clarke came home and we all went out for beers after a long, long, long day with Marcus at the fabric store -

BB: Oh God, I totally blocked out the fabric store.

OB: And Clarke was like, “my mom’s never been in a haunted house.” So then we were like, “Okay. Mystery solved.”

BB: Every time Marcus Kane shows back up and does some insanely over-the-top thing for the town, it’s always somehow for Abby. That’s what we all figured out. Not that it’s not for us, like not that it isn’t sincere, but it always starts with her. Have you ever noticed that?

RR: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

OB: Anyway, so once he found out Abby had never been in a haunted house, and she was sort of rolling her eyes at the whole thing and convinced that there was no way he could come up with anything that would actually scare her - well. I mean. What could we do?

BB: From then on it was kind of like a giant dare.

OB: I mean she’s a doctor, so blood doesn’t freak her out -

BB: Unfortunately for your “artistic vision” -

OB: But Clarke roped in a whole bunch of friends to help us plan and I think it was Monty who had the winning idea.

BB: Two words: Haunted. Dollhouse.

OB: Fucking genius.

BB: Okay, so once we had a theme, the guy went nuts. Rented Victorian furniture and everything. Callie Cartwig sewed costumes and made these creepy decaying-looking tattered velvet curtains for each room, me and Roan -

RR: The hunk from the hardware store?

BB: I wouldn’t necessarily -

OB: Yes you would. You _have,_ in fact.

BB: Anyway, me and Roan were like the construction crew. Marcus promised Vince he’d return the house in mint condition, so he couldn’t like tear up the floors and build trapdoors or anything, but we managed to rig up some cool shit.

OB: Trick walls where the paintings moved and books flew off the shelves, doorknobs that rattled on their own, stairs that thumped when you went up them like something was underneath . . .

BB: Clarke was kind of the set decorator, she’s the one with the artist eye, so she and Marcus were always arguing at the top of their lungs about things like exactly how many inches to peel off each strip of peeling fake wallpaper.

OB: Lincoln and Emori were in charge of the exteriors - all the grounds and stuff. And then Murphy and Monty and Harper were in charge of scavenging props. And I got to do my own room.

BB: Yeah, the compromise in exchange for O basically being the one to boss everyone around and keep the whole thing running when he went back to New York for two weeks was that she got to do a creepy murder shed in the back. Even though it didn’t go with the Victorian dollhouse theme at all, but that’s fine.

OB: It was the scariest part. Everybody said so.

BB: So everything’s humming along, we’re all getting like forty texts a day from New York about things like “what’s the UPS tracking number for the shipment of rubber bats,” you know, normal stuff -

OB: - and then he breaks the news to us that oh, by the way, we’re not just helping him assemble this haunted house, we’re _in_ it.

BB: The high school drama department was in rehearsals for _Sweeney Todd_ so like . . . he had this whole house but no actors.

OB: I was like “Can’t you get Meryl Streep to do it” but he did _not_ think that was funny.

BB: So then we had to figure out who was going to be in what room, doing what, it was a whole thing.

OB: Everyone had good ideas though.

BB: Really good. Monty’s creepy music box in the middle of the upstairs hallway?

OB: Chills. Every time.

BB: Murphy, on the other hand, was . . . what’s the nicest way to put this?

OB: Murphy would not make a good babysitter.

BB: We put him in the main entrance, taking tickets and sending the groups off to their first room, because he basically refused to do any, like, acting. So he had literally one job, which was to text all the groups in all the rooms and let us know what age range the kids were.

OB: You know, so you can go a little easy on the six-year-olds but then really double down to make the teenage boys wet their pants.

BB: Well, word spread fast, everyone knew the haunted house was happening, and by 8 pm or so it was a zoo. Lines around the block. So Murphy started sending groups in two at a time; one would go right around the main floor, then up the front staircase and down the back, like we’d planned it, and another would basically go in reverse - left around the main floor, up the back stairs and down the front. And he did pretty good keeping everything straight, until . . .

OB: Until the Girl Scouts.

BB: Group 1 was a pack of high school boys, who were totally rolling their eyes at the whole thing. The kind of customer you really want to give the full haunted house experience to, if you know what I mean.

OB: And Group 2 was a Girl Scout troup of first-graders on their way to a Halloween party.

BB: And Murphy got . . . a little confused.

OB: So the little girls came up the stairs into the attic - that was the final room, where we really pulled out all the stops. And Lincoln, who is hiding inside a giant mahogany wardrobe draped in white sheets, gets a text, thinks he’s got a room full of asshole teenagers, and just flings the wardrobe open and rattles his chains and screams “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”

BB: Aaaaaaaaaaaaand, they did.

OB: So Abby gets off work and shows up to check out what Marcus has been up to and the first fucking thing she sees is twenty shrieking terrified girls in princess dresses bolt out of every available exit, followed by, like, one panicking chaperone, while Murphy -

BB: Who at this point has realized this is all completely his fault -

OB: - is like pissing himself with laughter, because he can see that everyone waiting in line is now like awkwardly staring at each other, like, “oh shit, oh shit, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

BB: He did have to write an apology letter to the local Girl Scouts, but I don’t think he was that sorry.

OB: For a haunted house, that’s pretty good advertising.

BB: Abby tagged in to help Murphy at the door to make sure it didn’t happen again.

OB: So we closed down around midnight, but Marcus really wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to check out each other’s handiwork. And he wanted Abby to get to see it all, too. So we did a walkthrough, room by room, where the whole group went through from the beginning, and when we got to each room we’d wait in the hall while whoever was in charge ran in, did their setup, and called “ready,” and then we’d come in and get the tour.

BB: In my whole life I have never seen anything funnier than watching Abby Griffin walk through a haunted house for the first time.

OB: It started out very like, “oh, very nice, children, so this is what you’ve been working on,” but by the time we got to the parlor, with the eyes moving in the paintings and the fire in the fireplace mysteriously blowing out, she was looking a little green around the gills.

BB: And the ballroom was good too, with the music box in the hallway outside and Monty and Harper waltzing.

OB: She didn’t like my murder shed.

BB: She walked in, gave the blood-soaked walls that Mom Look she gets sometimes, and she goes, “Oh. This must be Octavia’s.”

OB: Well, Lincoln sure as hell got her back for me. The look on her face when he lurched out of that wardrobe -

BB: I mean, it was a scream. It was a for-real scream.

OB: So by now she’s like clutching Kane’s arm with her face buried in his shoulder, like she can hardly even look. But the best part is yet to come, of course, because the grand finale is on the other side of the attic, before you hit the back stairs for the exit, because that’s where Clarke got to do her bit.

BB: Clarke who, by the way, is absolutely never going to let her mother live this down.

OB: So the attic kind of wraps around the stairwell in the center, right, it’s sort of a ring, so first you sort of wander through spooky cobwebby furniture and then there’s a big moonlit window with tree branches waving outside, then you come around the corner and Lincoln does his Lincoln thing, and then, if you survive that, the last hurdle is the creepiest of all, which is the haunted nursery.

BB: Roan put a motor in the base of this old cradle so Lincoln could push a button on a remote and the cradle starts rocking as you walk by it.

OB: Fucking. Terrifying.

BB: Abby did _not_ like the haunted cradle.

OB: So in a corner of the haunted nursery was a life-sized store mannequin dressed as a toy soldier - I mean like facing you, in the light, you could tell it was obviously fake - and he’s bowing to a ballerina doll, who’s back is to you, and she isn’t moving.

BB: Double fake-out. You see the giant shapes, you think “holy shit those are people,” you look again, you realize the toy soldier is fake, you let out a sigh of relief.

OB: Then the ballerina stands up, and does a pirouette, and lifts her hand, and you can see _she has a bloody knife!_ Dun dun DUNNNNNNNNN

BB: Clarke nailed the choreography every time. It was amazing.

OB: It even scared _me,_ a little. And I helped her and Lincoln rehearse.  
BB: But Abby was, um …. not ready.

OB: Abby _screamed._

BB: She like whirled around and buried her face in Kane’s chest and she was like hyperventilating until Clarke broke character and came down to check on her because we were all laughing so hard.

OB: She was _so mad._ Apparently, and this is the truly evil part, her grandma had a creepy ballerina doll when Abby was little and she was convinced as a kid that it was haunted.

BB: Which both Clarke and Marcus obviously knew.

OB: I had a whole new respect for him after that. Like that's the mark of a true Halloween pro.

BB: Anyway it was such a hit that all the kids in town begged and pleaded for us to do it again next year, so . . .

OB: So Rock Star Dad _bought the fucking house._

BB: Abby only let him do it under the conditions that she gets her own room to decorate next year, as revenge.

OB: So if in your boxes of research you've managed to dig up anything Marcus Kane is terrified of, call Abby and let her know. She's making a list.

BB: It's going to get ugly. They're just going to take turns trying to one-up each other every year for the rest of their lives.

OB: Marriage goals.

BB: They're ridiculous.

OB: Shut up. They’re cute.

BB: Anyway, that's the story. I don't know why you wanted this in the book. It doesn't have anything to do with music. Or with his career or anything.

OB: Sure it does.

BB: What do you mean?

OB: You said it yourself. Every time he does what looks like just some kind of crazy over-the-top rich guy thing, it's always about Abby.

BB: I don't know that she thought having her pants scared off was much of a romantic gift.

OB: You really don't know anything about women.

BB: Hey now.

OB: It's because of Clarke. Because it's something for him and Clarke to do together. For him to get to spend time with her friends. It's because it's the kind of thing a dad would do. That's why it matters to Abby. That's why it's the same. The guy who became a rock star writing hundreds of songs about how much he loves a woman just dropped $300,000 just to have a project to work on every year to spend time with his stepdaughter. I think Abby thinks that's worth a couple creepy doll nightmares.

RR: Earthquakes.

BB: What?

RR: I just remembered. He told me once. That's his biggest fear. He's afraid of earthquakes.

OB: You think a year’s enough time for you and Roan to rig up a fake earthquake in the haunted house?

BB: I think that can be arranged.

OB: It'll give you an excuse to hang out in his woodshop a lot, so it's kind of a win-win for you.

BB: Do _not_ put that in the book.

RR: We’ll see.

BB: Raven, I swear to God -

RR: Well, you didn't say “off the record.”

BB: I hate you both so much.

**[END RECORDING]**

 


End file.
